Thursday, 22 December 2016

The Fabulous Animal Jamboree - part 3

3.

The thing worrying Maude was: did Deidre
actually count?

If
they went all the way to Paris, would she be turned away for not being real
enough?

The
Tigon nipped out of her glass case one night – very carefully, so she didn’t
actually shatter anything and make a mess. She padded through the museum halls
to consult with one of the oldest of the revenants in the whole collection.
They called him Stan, and he was a T Rex towering two stories high. He was
frozen forever in an attitude of ferocious attack (which he actually found
rather taxing. All that constant attitude.) Visitors to the museum loved to
take selfies with him, and so it was imperative he always looked his most
ferocious.

Maude
had paid him a number of visits and they enjoyed the camaraderie of high class
carnivores. The instinctive rapport of those who had once shared the topmost
point of their respective food chains.

‘Oh,
I see,’ mused Stan. ‘Well, I think you’re quite right to worry. I only ever
attended a couple of those French shindigs and I never felt quite welcome. Not
that they could complain, though. I mean, you can’t get more extinct than me,
can you? But I’m not exactly what you might call stuffed. And the Parisians can
by so snooty. There were raised eyebrows about my being fossilized and not being
in actual possession of any of my original fleshly-parts, as it were… Well, I
didn’t mind. I don’t bruise easily. But poor old Deirdre might be upset by
them. I’d hate that to happen to the poor old duck. She’d be mortified…’

Maude
nodded her shaggy head. ‘Perhaps it’s best if I stopped encouraging her? Maybe
I should never have started her off on these mad thoughts about Christmas in Paris..?’

*

The next night Maude was woken at dusk by
Deidre. ‘How are we going to get there anyway?’

‘Oh,
well,’ said Maude, feeling shifty. ‘That’s to do with magic. You know that
giant crab spider downstairs in the main hall?’

‘Eric?’

‘He
can do magic. Any sort. He was always a dab hand. Back in the old days he did
amazing things at Christmas. One year he turned us all invisible. We caught the
train and then the ferry and another train. It was a hoot! And then another
year he cast a spell so that we could fly all the way to Paris! That was the
best. Can you picture it? Dozens of stuffed animals, streaming through the starry
night…’

Deidre’s
eyes were gleaming.

‘Another
year he commandeered a Manchester tram and hypnotized the driver. We climbed
aboard and then the whole thing took to the air and soared through a
blizzard…!’

‘It
all sounds wonderful,’ said Deidre.

Maude
gulped. She was only making the Dodo worse. She was getting her hopes up.